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Everyone who has done BIOS work thinks that UEFI is a bloated mess, to put it lightly. UEFI is itself an environment with comparable complexity to an operating system. Linus' posts about it are worth reading:

https://yarchive.net/comp/linux/efi.html

The result should be generation of intermediate files and the final hello.efi program file of about 46KiB on a 64-bit system

That's bigger than the whole MS-DOS 3.2 kernel.

I agree UEFI is the way to go. Just curious, how do people debug their programs though? Older non-pc systems had really decent debuggers built in.

QEMU and Tianocore works in some cases.

There are couple ways. You can compile UEFI for QEMU (OVMF package or possibly compile coreboot with Tianocore payload). Another way is just output. UEFI gives you shell, so you can see output and in UEFI it's much easier to deal with this stuff.

If you use coreboot and libpayload it's much easier because it offers you built-in GDB server you can connect to via serial port.

I still don't really understand the necessity of EFI